Forum:One Last Look at The War That Prematurely Ejaculated
TWTPE So now that TWTPE has ended, why don't we share any thoughts we may have had over how the series as a whole wound up. Generally speaking I would say I like the ending. I like the idea of Hitler falling from internal pressures and a new German government reaching an honorable peace without being occupied, and the country being strong enough to resist getting bitched around by conquerors. I like that Central Europe seems to have at least a sliver of a hope of breaking the old cycle of having to make the awful choice between red and brown. I like the USA and USSR not going directly into a Cold War setup and the implication that the people of the world may get the chance to remember that there's more to life than a desperate, never-ending struggle just to survive for the sake of surviving. :I tend to agree with much of this. HT didn't stick the landing, but he did enough right for me to be ok with the final product. The fall of Hitler was good, and little touches like Germany still holding onto Austria, Bohemia and Moravia, the USSR gobbling up the Baltics, etc The one unsatisfactory point is the open-ended war with Japan. A more coordinated effort between the US and the USSR against Japan is an intriguing idea, and I found his decision to leave that open ended frustrating. TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::Agree on the last point. If he'd evacuated Fujita and hadn't left McGill stranded on a desert island for his last three scenes, and maybe transferred Mouradian to the Asian theater for his last couple of scenes, we could have seen things starting to move in a certain direction and perhaps contented ourselves that we knew where they'd end up. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) :::HT did a similar ending with the Days of Infamy series, once Hawaii was liberated, the rest of the Pacific Theatre would pretty much follow OTL. I guess the USSR pursuing a one front war as an ally of the US makes it different enough for your scenario with Fujita, McGill and Mouradian worth doing. Maybe Ivan Kuchkov being sent east rather to a gulag would give us another, Soviet ground pounder POV. ML4E (talk) 19:02, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::::Implying that it's going to be the OTL script from here on out is one thing, but we're looking at a significant change here, with the Soviets getting involved in something more than mop-up. And with the atomic bomb as well. Even if Einstein wins Herb over, it's unlikely they'll have the bomb before it's time to invade the Home Islands. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:50, August 7, 2014 (UTC) ::::::It wasn't as bad as it could have been, but I expected a little bit more. Especially with finishing off Japan. I think HT could have bridged the US/USSR alliance connection with the two Marines at Unit 731 facilities, Weinstein and Szulc. Instead, we never heard from them again. JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) It's a good end point. The problem is, it was such a long walk to get there, by such a circuitous route. The seeds of this conclusion were all there from the beginning of the series, but they fizzled and were then ignored in favor of other plot lines which ultimately went nowhere. Then all of a sudden they were revisited. It's pretty clear HT went into this series without much of an idea of what he wanted to do with it. "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if WWII started a year early. It looks like it would pretty much go more or less the same. Sure Poland's joined the Axis and France isn't folding at the first blow, but the broad strokes are all pretty much the same as OTL. Britain and France are going to war to save a Central European ally, but they can't actually reach it to help so they just demonstrate along Germany's western border. Hitler's kicking the shit out of the Central European countries that he wants. Now he's blitzing the Low Countries. Now he's in France. He's almost at Paris--Ooh, I don't want a complete OTL redux, I'll play deus ex machina and have the German offensive crap out for no reason. "But again, compared with OTL, Hitler's reaching for the same places on the map in the same order. So is Stalin. Now they both want the same thing, so they're fighting each other. Germany's invading the USSR. It's making massive gains. Some of the people there are glad to see the Communist Party on the ropes and are supporting Germany. Others are not. Guerrilla war. Hungary and Romania are coming along for the ride. Mussolini's playing his own game, with Hitler's unenthusiastic support. Now Germany's blitzing Denmark and Norway. The US is keeping out of it but is rooting hard for the Western Allies from the sidelines. "This is boring. Time for a shakeup. Ooh! I wonder what would happen if the UK and France switched sides and helped Hitler fight Stalin? "Actually, I don't like this so much. I'm going to have them switch back right away. "Oh look, now Italy's fighting Britain in North Africa, but losing. Maybe I can have Germans come in and turn the tables. Now it's stabilizing . . . Japan jumped the US, it's taking Britain's colonies in Southeast Asia and pushing deeper out into the Pacific. It's sucker-punching the US Navy. The US will have to take some time to consolidate its forces and counterattack. . . . "Damn, it's back to OTL again. I need another shakeup . . . Remember when I almost had the generals overthrow Hitler? Why did I decide not to go with that? Ah, hell, I'll start it up again." Without all these pointless diversions and long periods of parallelism, the series could have wound up where it did in half the time. Yes, I know that both HT and Del Rey make more money off of six books than they do off of three, but I guess I somehow still cling to naive notions of artistic integrity trumping flagrant greed. I really should know better than that by now. And I don't want to accuse HT of flagrant greed in this case, but I'm just having such a hard time coming up with a purely creative reason for writing a series that's more than 50% filler. :Indeed. The changes you propose wouldn't even have necessarily precluded six volumes. In hindsight, most of the crucial European plot points of LO could easily have happened in 2F: the American entry into the War, the overthrow of Hitler, the death of Sanjurjo--all could happened a volume earlier at least without violating narrative logic. LO could have been the peace in Europe and the final crushing of Japan, in the broad mode of IatD. TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::Yeah, a proper conclusion would have been nice. The fall of the Nazis was done properly, and the SCW . . . came to a decisive end, if nothing else. But the conclusions on other fronts were rushed. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) ::::I wasn't too thrilled with the way he handled the fall of the Nazis. It seemed like the generals and the average Hans were more upset with Adolf for losing the war than for his crimes. The same argument was often made in regards to the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, I was like wait a minute, status quo antebellum (more or less given the Reich keeps Austria and Bohemia)? What about reparations for the millions killed in Russia, the damage in France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia? It was a little too clean.JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) :::::Well it's not hard to see why leading Germany down the road to ruin would get Germans more excited than anything else. And reparations, no way was that going to happen, for any number of reasons. The Allies did not defeat Germany; Germany sued for peace from a position of relative strength, so you can't dictate terms to them. The Committee chucked Hitler because they foresaw he was going to get them another Versailles; how could they then possibly accept another Versailles themselves? The Allies were hurt by each other as well as by Germany, raising the question of reparations is likely to get them fighting among themselves. We might even hope the Allies actually learned a lesson from the last screw job they tried to impose on Germany. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:50, August 10, 2014 (UTC) It's even more apparent with the Spanish subplot. So in the end Jezek really did pot Sanjurjo, and that really did spell the end of Spanish Nationalism. (Though I'm sure the Republic will remain nationalist with a small n, communist governments almost always do.) But that wasn't a long walk to get there--it was a long period of standing still. TR spent several years predicting this outcome, with me responding "Nah, if that's what HT wanted to do he would have done it already. It will end in stalemate." Well it stayed static forever, till all of a sudden it wasn't. What the hell? :There was a period where I was somewhat hopeful that there would be a North Spain run by Kim Il-sung clones and a South Spain run by Sanjurjo and King Juan III. I don't think it was until Jezek started killing people in Spain that I realized that the Republic was probably going to win. TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::I was also expecting a divided Spain at first, but when Jezek started doing his thing, well, that was half of TBS and all of CdE and 2F. A long time for nothing much to happen. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) I really don't see why it was included in the series at all. With the exception of Jezek getting out of France when the Big Switch happened (and there must have been other ways to pull that off), what happened down there never had any bearing whatsoever on the rest of the story. It didn't even have any kind of thematic resonance, except perhaps "Oh, look, we've had a civil war in one country all this time, and now that it's over, we have another starting somewhere else." It seemed to be happening (or, far more often, not happening) in a vacuum. Did HT want to write a SCW AH so badly, but didn't think anyone would go for it, so he folded it into another project? I guess I can see that happening. But if you take all the scenes set in Spain over a six-year period, you could surely make one full-length novel on the subject. Well the quantity's there, anyway; the lack of any developments in the story as he told it would preclude a proper novel. Though under those constraints he might have been forced to tell a story in which more than one event actually happened. That would be an improvement. :I'm still convinced that the SCW was there because HT figured out early on just how long it was going to take him to make the European war appreciably different from OTL. Pure utilitarianism. TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::So it was just there to pad out the series and give us something else to watch while the A plot ponderously unfolded? Well maybe. I mean, I could see him doing that for the first three books, perhaps, but then it was time to commit to the main story. So just have Jezek stumble upon Sanjurjo two years earlier than he did, and the SCW is all wrapped up. Then you could have Jezek go to Britain and join the SOE for all manner of thrilling adventures while Weinberg gets involved in the Republic's government and gives us some sense of what's next for them. Weinberg became a lot less dogmatic as the series went on, perhaps he could become involved in a faction within the party which is trying to create a government that is more flexible and pragmatic, and there's some dramatic final confrontation with La Martellita, who of course is on the side of the rigidly ideological faction. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) ::::Weinberg (if there are to be any sequels) would be a good OSS operative. If the US/USSR want to stick it to Germany under the radar, he'd be a good candidate. I doubt we'll see any of that though.JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) :::::You think so? He's got combat experience, but it's very blah: He was a rifleman, like zillions of others. And a rifleman on a front that rarely burned as hot as the ones in the main war did, too. And now he's got a disability. Also, both the US and the USSR would have to consider him politically unreliable. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:50, August 10, 2014 (UTC) By the way, I can't help thinking what a contradictory tale it wound up being. In the beginning, the Nationalists don't win on the OTL schedule because Sanjurjo's still around, and he's such a jerk that his mere presence holds them back. In the end, you remove Sanjurjo and his side is fucked, because he was the only one holding them together. He's too useless to live and too important to die. How the hell can you have both in the same continuity? :HT created a similar paradox in Featherston, although Jake was far more I don't know, talented. And arguably, such a paradox existed with Featherston's direct model. Your mileage on that theory will vary, of course. TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::Well Featherston and his direct model, as you say, were men of action and dynamism whose reaches exceeded their grasps, and who were so used to the idea that failure was, at worst, a temporary setback, that when the ground shifted under them permanently they became increasingly erratic. Sanjurjo, now, he was just a bumbling buffoon (at least as HT portrayed him, I know next to nothing about the historical figure). Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) :::I think you are mixing up political effectiveness with military effectiveness. Sanjurjo (especially with the loss of Franco (who is still dead, too)) made the Nationalists ineffective militarily but with him as leader, no one was in any position to challenge him politically. With his death, these factions began fighting over the leadership position leading to an end of the stalemate. ML4E (talk) 19:02, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::::Eh I guess. I did think that having Sanjujo outlive Franco might be the key variable here: It's good to have him die when Franco's around to pick up the pieces, but it's bad to have him die when Franco's not. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:50, August 7, 2014 (UTC) Moving on from story, I want to talk about characters. I'm not going to say much about anyone in particular, but I really don't have terribly strong opinions of the cast generally. When HW came out I found some of them odious and the rest of them tedious. There was nothing apart from unlikeability to make any of them pop out. Not at first, anyway. Over time most of them did eventually manage to develop a unique voice sooner or later (and most of those who didn't were killed off and replaced by someone who did). I couldn't stand Weinberg at first, but he really came to grow on me as time went by (which was the only real redeeming virtue to the unbroken monotony of the Spanish subplot). I enjoyed Peggy's time in Europe, even though I complained about how she wasn't making the most of it to affect affairs over there. She got a lot more boring when she came home (though I still wanted her around because she offered such a unique perspective as a civilian, a citizen of a neutral country, and, less importantly, a woman). In Book 6 she sort of rallied over Book 5; but while her slice-of-life-on-the-home-front story was more interesting than focusing full time on her smoking career, it was still pretty thin stuff next to what she'd been when she started. There was one scene about halfway through LO where she was ruminating on how those earlier experiences had changed her outlook, and I actually found myself thinking "Oh yeah, that's right, she was trapped behind the lines for a while. Huh, feels like it happened to a whole different character." I liked Walsh mainly because of his contacts with the people in power in his country. He should have spent a lot more time on that and less leading his squad. There's nothing wrong with the majority of his scenes where he's on the front lines, but they had so much less to offer than what he'd been doing elsewhere. More on that later. Baatz was a jerk, Dernen should have shot him in the back when he had the chance. But he wasn't a really diabolical love-to-hate type character, just kind of a generalized "Oh, yeah, he's an asshole." The only thing you could say about him was that you looked forward to his death, and when it finally came it was incredibly underwhelming. But even if it had had a lot more oomph to it, again, you didn't hate him, you just disliked him, so there wouldn't have been much in the way of catharsis. :I think HT may have intended to frag Baatz initially but decided he needed a pro-Nazi POV after the successful coup. Making that POV unpleasant but not evil made the story-telling easier. ML4E (talk) 19:02, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::That's possible, but it would mean HT knew where he wanted the story to end up well in advance. I don't believe he did at all, as evidenced by the fact that he started to go down a few different avenues at one point or another, reversed, and settled on something he'd teased earlier and then dropped. In that YouTube interview TR found last winter he admitted that the endings of Great War and Worldwar were both plotted out with the story well under way, and both of them felt a lot smoother than TWTPE. Also, there's Rudel to consider, HT could have believably pushed him into that role. If HT wasn't comfortable having a more or less decent guy go that way, kill him off and replace him with the Loyalty Officer. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:50, August 7, 2014 (UTC) For the first two books I couldn't believe how useless McGill was; he could not have been less relevant to the story. Clearly HT was keeping him around till the Pacific War started, and when it did he served a role . . . for a while. But then he spent his last three scenes literally stranded on a desert island! At least when he was in Beijing and Shanghai, you had a chance of enjoying the sights and sounds of those cities through his eyes while you waited for the story to resume. But Midway! And to make matters even worse, during his quarantine, shit was actually happening in the Pacific, completely unseen and uncovered. Geez. Adi Stoss taking over the last POV slot in the end . . . odd choice. Between Theo (who we all of a sudden learn at the very end is the son of a Roman history buff himself?) and Sarah, whose stories were already sharply converging when Adi joined the cast, we already had that little corner of the world well covered. Adding a third POV just made it claustrophobic. :I think HT needed Adi as a POV to properly tie up his story. We needed to get inside his head as a POV rather than hear it second hand from Theo and/or Sarah. In Theo's first POV in W&E, he reflects on his unusual first name and how it came about because his father was a big fan of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. If that was with deliberate intent by Turtledove, it was one hell of a bit of foreshadowing. I had forgotten about it until the scene in LO where Theo expresses an interest in Sarah. ML4E (talk) 19:02, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::Did Theo say that before? I'll take your word for it. I can't imagine HT had that particular wrinkle in mind that far out, though, so I'm going to call it happy coincidence. ::I did enjoy finally getting inside Adi's head, but I enjoyed it less than I felt suffocated by having a third POV added to two others whose stories were rapidly converging already. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:50, August 7, 2014 (UTC) ::::Going back to my initial reaction above, I feel Adi's and the Goldmans' endings were a bit soft-boiled. Sure he's a loyal German of the Jewish religion, but I just don't buy the Salvation Committee being a much better alternative. Yes, anything is better than the Nazis but it doesn't jive with me. Maybe I'm too stuck in OTL. On the other hand, wouldn't it have been better for Adi to be faced with a Jew on the other side? Maybe Sasha Davidov? Someone who would be some sort of barometer for him, the way the partisan Max was for Heinrich Jager in Worldwar?JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) :::::I don't see why meeting another Jew would have any effect on Adi's character, especially considering that, while he was in the USSR, he had to keep his heritage secret. And why shouldn't he be happy with the Committee? They just don't seem to care much about race at all; what more can you ask for? Turtle Fan (talk) 18:50, August 10, 2014 (UTC) And speaking of Sarah, she was a disappointment herself. There was no emotional punch to her story, not really; it was just a by-the-numbers account of falling into dreary routines in a tough old world. I was hoping there'd be some real tension and terror associated with her story, as there was with Ealstan's and Vanai's back in the day. The hardships and indignities she and her family endured were bad, to be sure, but those of us with knowledge of OTL know it could have been so much worse than it was. And then when she's at ground zero of the uprising that finally does Hitler in, she's barely got anything more to say about it than other characters who are hearing about it on the radio and through the rumor mill. I understand that she wasn't in a position to become deeply involved, but she must have been able to do something more than she did. :: I half-expected her to join the spontaneous anti-Nazi resistance in Munster and then meet her brother.JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) :::That would have been good. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:50, August 10, 2014 (UTC) I actually found I said that about so many scenes in the series. There's just so much that was wasted! Everything in Spain, everything with Lemp, half of Peggy's scenes in Europe and all but a small handful after she got back, way too many of McGill's . . . And the front lines scenes! Good God they were all so monotonous. Whether it was combat or camp life, they rarely advanced the story, and they were all so repetitive. Not just repetitive of each other, either; it's the exact same stuff we got in GW, RE, Worldwar, DoI, even Derlavai. All the magical stuff in Derlavai had a 1:1 correspondent with an industrial element of mechanized warfare, and once the novelty wore off, it was the same old shit (though it wasn't quite as old then as it was in this series). HT had better not give us another mechanized war for a while. : My thoughts exactly!JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) ::I'd also like to see characters whose ideas of recreation encompass something other than alcohol and prostitution; but while giving up on mechanized warfare might give us some variety in the combat and camp scenes, I can't think of anything that would force him to write more interesting liberty scenes. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:50, August 10, 2014 (UTC) But while very few of the characters really impressed me enough that I genuinely cared about them, I still would have preferred they get happy endings. But most of their sendoffs were either way too abrupt and inconclusive (To think the damned pussy was the last we'll ever see of Mouradian! And we took our leave of Rudel right before the crisis that would force the transformation he'd been building to all along) or very grim. Weinberg's last scene was, well . . . not very true to character: "I'm a communist, and I can't wait to take advantage of all the opportunities Wall Street generates!" Still, at least we know he'll land on his feet. (Also, I couldn't decide between amusement and irritation at one of the signs of a prosperous city being sidewalks that are just carpeted with cigarette butts that a lot of assholes were too inconsiderate to dispose of properly.) I'm not generally into--what do they call it, shipping?--but Theo becoming a Goldman-in-law is an idea I kind of like, even though it was rushed through in the final act. For most of the others I'm finding I'm already starting to forget where they ended up, and I just don't give a shit. :Regarding the characters--there were a few I also grew fond of. For me, the central problem with the series was HT's almost steadfast refusal to get any these people into the halls of power. As I've said elsewhere, for the first two volumes, groundpounders and civilians were ok--the governments of 1938 in HW were the same as in OTL, and it didn't take much to figure out what the various heads of state/govt were thinking. This is rather consistent with other works--WW had a few characters in power up front, such as Atvar and Molotov, and 191 had Dowling working next to Custer, but for the most part, HT populates his series with Everyday Types. :However, in those series, characters do advance and can become movers and shakers (Yeager, Flora, Featherston, etc). Starting with TBS, HT sort of seemed poised to do that with a couple of characters, Walsh most dramatically, and then...no. And from that point on, I am of the opinion that the overall story would absolutely have been served by such POVs. The British military coup is, in my opinion, the biggest running sore of the back-half of the series--this is a BRITISH MILITARY COUP AND JUNTA. This is something that hasn't been seen in centuries. The ins and outs of this should be explored in some detail. The were several points I felt as if HT was going provide such an exploration, like have Walsh join the government, or kill off Walsh and put Cartland in, but instead Walsh goes to Africa, Walsh gets shot, Walsh goes to Belgium, Walsh goes home and has a pint. Ho-hum. ::And he named the entire book Coup d'Etat, no less. Yes, that's by far my biggest complaint about the entire series. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) :And this was true of a few other characters. Weinberg could easily have become more of a government apparachik for the Republic--he seemed poised that way when he was proselytizing to Delgadillo in W&E. Lemp came into contact with Donitz several times, and could have been more included in the Guderian plot. ::::I was disappointed that Kuchkov went into a gulag. It seemed like HT rehashed Ussmak's ending. Also, if the NKVD was too lazy to fill out some paperwork to get them to a penal batallion, why did it go through the trouble of making sure his unit got the worst assignments? It's a lot more work than straight up sending them into a shtrafbat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtrafbat). The NKVD was about efficiency as much as the next totalitarian secret service.JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) :::::I'm sure Kuchkov will do far better in the gulag than Ussmak, but yeah, it's still a downer ending. I wish he and his guys had opened fire on the Chekists who tried to disarm him; going out in a blaze of glory would have been much more satisfying. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:50, August 10, 2014 (UTC) ::Weinberg and Lemp, and Peggy's political stumping could have led to bigger and better things, perhaps even culminating in a junior membership in Roosevelt's brain trust. And criminally, these three characters--Weinberg, Lemp, and second-half-of-the-story Druce--were characters that weren't remotely useful to HT in the roles they did fill. Weinberg covered a front where nothing ever happened for years at a time, Lemp's scenes were so repetitive and undistinguished that the word "monotonous" is inadequate to describe them, and Peggy's domestic life, while not entirely devoid of human interest value, had nothing to do with the premise that had attracted me to the series in the first place and kept me coming back. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) :::Especially since Weinberg's front POV could have been handled by Jezek's, and Lemp's by radio reports Peggy and/or Sarah hear. ML4E (talk) 19:02, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::::Lemp's could have been dispensed with altogether. And given the glacial pace of developments in the Spanish trenches, one POV would have been more than adequate. Especially since, if Weinberg were an apparatchik, he'd still get regular "updates" anyway. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:50, August 7, 2014 (UTC) ::::::Rudel was also a bit off to me. The man was more or less a Nazi diehard until the day he died. I don't think he would have hesitated to shoot up German "traitors tainted with Bolshevik, Jewish, plutocrat, take your pick viruses"JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) :::::::I suppose his different experiences in the different war could have contributed to that. Still, I felt his arc ended one scene too early. He needed to be put into a situation where he absolutely had to commit to one side or the other, not duck the question by clinging to a point of military protocol. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:50, August 10, 2014 (UTC) :Part and parcel is HT's rigid formula for longer series: create a dozen POVs, rotate through to tell part of the story, kill and replace with second-stringers from time to time as needed. At this point, it feels more like a mechanical device for HT to insure he finishes a book, rather than the best method for story telling. One of the strengths of MwIH was his willingness to break that pattern to show us the Werewolves doing various awful things. :Once upon a time, HT was willing to be more flexible. Worldwar proper had a few one-off POVs throughout. And while Marcus Aemilius Scaurus is the primary POV in TML, at the end of the book, when everything is going to shit, HT employs other POVs. ::Yeah. I do worry that HT's been set in this pattern so long it's becoming increasingly hard to imagine him breaking out of it. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) :Switching gears slightly to illustrate my point: for shits and giggles I'm reading Himmler's War by Robert Conroy. It's only the second one of his I've read, and it was the only Conroy book our library had. While I have several problems with it, one definite strength is Conroy's willingness to check in on military and political leaders for a page or two to fill in the big picture, e.g., Von Papen (having replaced Ribbontrop) and Molotov meeting in Sweden to broker a peace now that Hitler is dead. The reader knows what's happening and why, and the story feels more believable as a result (of course, Conroy fumbles the ball in other ways on the plausibility front, but that's irrelevant to my point.) :::I think it's no small secret that "Con"-roy ranks pretty low on my scale of AH writers. Himmler's War was pretty damn bad. He gets progressively worse in my opinion. If you like comic books, check out Uber. It's a pretty awesome book about actual Nazi supermen.JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) :So I think HT needs to change his approach to characters. He needs to be flexible with POVs, or throw in more "great men" among the "little men". TWPE probably lays those issues bare. TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::We can hope. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) This is definitely it for TWTPE, though. There was a tremendous air of finality to this book, at least as much so as there was with IatD. Ironically, it's ending at the very point when I'm becoming genuinely interested in what comes next. Europe's in for a very different second half of the twentieth century (though if HT did try to keep going he'd probably end up regressing to the mean sooner or later). I even care about Spain all of a sudden: Especially now that they've absorbed so much of a Stalinist marinade in taking so much aid from Moscow, the Republic's ideology is so foreign to Spanish culture that I'd be very interested to see how they try to consolidate power. I think they'd have to step lightly around their neighbors as well; the USSR is far away, and no one closer is going to help them if they piss off the capitalists who surround them. I have to think that, if they survive, it will be as something like Tito's Yugoslavia: communist, but independent of the USSR, on good terms with non-communists, and tolerant of all sorts of things of which Party doctrine disapproves. But repressive just the same. But despite these pleasant diversions, I'm very ready to say goodbye to this continuity. :I agree. Peggy's phone call to Herb about Einstein's pending arrival is tantamount to writing "The End". Given the unresolved state of the Pacific, a masochistic part of me would welcome "The Coldest War: Japan Gets Its Ass Kicked" next year (followed in 2016 by "TCW: Stalin Gets His Kicked, The End"), but I can live the remainder of my life content that Japan did get its ass kicked off-page. (Truthfully, at the risk of sounding Gizzist, I'd rather welcome a return to 191 or Worldwar at this stage.) TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) :::::I wouldn't mind seeing no more than 3 books dealing with the defeat of Japan and a 20 years later post-war. Then again I'm a glutton for punishment. JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) ::After seven years I still have no appetite for more TL-191. I've said before that if I could demand one project from HT, it would be an Atlantis-style series of novellas set in the Race's pre-Tosevite history. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) A Word From Mr Nelg I just want to say that I'm finished with Harry as a fan and the reason for my long absence was because I just didn't want to make a scene. However, I feel I should at least explain myself. My opinion of the series is that it's an organised mess. Like SJ said and I agree with, the whole thing feels like Harry wanted a Spanish CW AH, and just folded it into an AH world war 2 story. The reason I agree with this is because the whole SCW feels like it had a plan. I was really interested to see where it would go, because I wanted to know why Harry would have two POD's rather than the usual one. There was no connection. You could cut either part out and it would have no impact on anything: Only Czechoslovakia has any sort of connection. Speaking of which, I LOVE what Harry did with Czechoslovakia. What he dose is paint the Czech's situation off as a tragedy and by God it works. The reason is that Harry shows, and doesn't tell. He SHOWS us the Czech's situation, he SHOWS us the titanic effort that put up in the face of overwhelming odds. He SHOWS us their betrayal at the hands of the allies that fought so hard to protect. He SHOWS us their struggle afterwards and the unhappy ending that they get. The tragedy is that the Czech's threw all their effort and weight into this war, achieved some fairy decent wins, greatly helped the allies they were fighting for, got nothing for it, and nobody cares. BAM! Perfect! Beautiful! It brings a tear to my eye and it really dose earn Harry a standing ovation. It shows us what Harry can accomplish when he puts his mind to it. Although brilliant, it's still not enough to dislodge Canada's last stand in the GW from the No. 1 position of Best Last Stand Ever. :Just earlier today I reflected out of a clear blue sky "Sure is a shame those poor Czechs are still fucked, even though they did everything right." We can hope the Salvation Committee at least gives them decent treatment within Germany. (Hmm, the return of the old pre-WWI multiethnic empires would be one worthwhile takeaway from this story, and would be an interesting story in its own right, whether or not it's tied into this one.) Turtle Fan (talk) 03:45, October 3, 2014 (UTC) :I do think the show-don't-tell rule gets overbilled. There are many, many things that are just as good if not better happening unseen. For instance, I feel Doctor Who was infinitely better when the Last Great Time War was a vague concept that my imagination had woven together from a handful of tantalizing clues than it is now that it's the result of some graphic designer's indigestion plus a few extras in Time Lord costumes pathetically begging the Daleks for mercy in some back alley while small controlled fires burn in the background. There are many counterexamples to that rule, but I can't think of any really big ones in HT's work. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:45, October 3, 2014 (UTC) : While exposition makes for a useful and sometimes necessary tool, too much of it makes for lazy story telling and often knee-caps what could've been a very effective scene. Still, I know what you mean, but you also have to remember Doctor Who is visual media and that's different from literature. TV is limited by a budget while literature is limited by the authors imagination. Still, I agree with you that the clues and hints that were built up over six seasons conjuring up images of this titanic death struggle that destroyed a whole world and two species, instead leads to nothing more than Timelords running around a destroyed city shooting lasers at Dalek's.Mr Nelg (talk) 01:21, October 4, 2014 (UTC) ::And on top of that, it doesn't fit with what little we'd known before. "The End of Time," previously the closest we'd come to glimpsing the war directly, invoked a three-cornered struggle at least (the Nightmare Child, the Could've Been King, etc) locked in a stalemate careening toward mutually assured destruction, flat-out says Gallifrey is the furthest edge of the war, and makes crystal clear that the Time Lords have become hopelessly morally corrupted and are both more dangerous and more hateful than the Daleks themselves by that point. "Day of the Doctor" makes no mention of the Nightmare Child, Could've Been King, etc; shows Gallifrey on the front lines; shows the Daleks on the verge of total victory; and gives the evil Time Lords a complete whitewash. This is the largest of several thousand reasons that the episode sucked balls. Turtle Fan (talk) 17:15, October 4, 2014 (UTC) ::But I can think of some literary examples as well. Some of the more ponderous literary epics, like Dune and A Game of Thrones, often invoke major events that happen off-stage by having characters discuss these in dribs and drabs, so that what seems at first to be a confusing throwaway reference is eventually revealed as a central part of the story's mythos. By that point, going back and having someone actually experience that part of the story (as, for instance, Frank Herbert's son Brian has done with many of his own Dune novels) is usually quite anticlimactic. Several authors have played in Shakespeare's sandbox, telling various versions of the backstory of the relationship among Claudius, Gertrude, and Hamlet the Elder; and guess what? None of them are nearly as interesting as the purely-expository relevant scenes of Hamlet are. Turtle Fan (talk) 17:15, October 4, 2014 (UTC) I also admit I like how Germany was able to overthrow the Nazi's and skipped out on the horror of the holocaust. It's a nice happy ending. Speaking of which, it feels as though Harry was going for as much of a happy ending as possible. All of the Allies, with the exception of the the Czech's, get a happy ending: Even the Axis, with the exception of the Baltic states, Ukraine and Japan. Possibly even Poland if you count that little bit of territory that they lost. What I don't like is the war its self. Again, like SJ said, the battles are bland and text book in their execution. I've forgotten who said this, but it's said that war is a series of error's and that victory goes to the side that makes the least number. It's like Harry based victory on what would logically happen, and therefore, you know what's going to happen. Other times, all the action happens off screen and we're told about it, thus breaking the cardinal rule of story telling: Show, don't tell. Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen saga knows how to make a battle exciting, because he throws us into the thick of the action. There are times when the enemy looks like they're going to win, but the good guys manage to out fox them at the last minute, or the naval battle between the USS Walker and the Dom navy at Hawaii. It looks like the good guys are going to win when the guy in charge gets too cocky and makes a mistake. Genius. The main problem with this series is the characters. Harry devotes all his time and effort into his characters and the end result is that they don't exist to tell THE story, they exist to tell THEIR story. The actually story its self is told in bullet points. I believe that's the main problem with the Super Volcano series, am I right? Some of them I liked. I like the Goldman's and I'm glad that they had a happy ending. Like SJ, Peggy's time in Europe, and the reason why was that it showed us Europe rather than telling us: Again, show don't tell. Other than that, the rest of the characters are easily forgettable. This entire sires feels bloated and leaves me with the exact feeling I experienced after finishing Days of Infamy: I've waisted my time and money. In fact, I forgive DOI, because at least it had a point: TWTPE has no point. There's a bit of irony in the first novel in which Samuel Goldman makes the comment that writers are paid by pages and because of this, they try to expand their works so that they get more money;P This series has left me feeling exhausted and no desire to continue on if there is a squeal. In fact, now that it's over, I'll summaries up my feelings by quoting Sam Clemens at the end of HFR. It's over. Thank God.Mr Nelg (talk) 02:19, October 3, 2014 (UTC) :Hi Nelg! I think you pretty much said it all there. I understand why you've lost patience with HT; I share many of your complaints, to the extent that the last two or three years I got the books from the public library because I knew they wouldn't be worth the money. (I've also gotten all but one of the Destroyermen books, which you mention, from there, though I would be willing to lay out money for them if I had no free option.) :Please do pop in every now and then even if you're no longer reading Turtledove. We spend a lot of time on here just chewing the fat, you know. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:45, October 3, 2014 (UTC) Future Del Rey Works? That raises my last question, though. HT and Del Rey have been putting out a novel every summer since at least 1997. My interest level has waxed and waned from one year to the next, but it's become such a part of my annual rhythm that I'd miss these books if they went away altogether. And every time I've said HT's not going to do another series after he finishes one up, he's surprised me. So what do we think will be next? As I said, I'm so sick of WWII; and I don't think he can do any more with it, either. This series has just covered so many different AH options that I have to think he's out of ideas. Not all of them were followed up on, but we at least flirted with: no appeasement; France stays in the fight; Japan swings north instead of south; the US keeps out of Europe (that changed in the very end, but the war ended so quickly after that that I'm counting it); Britain goes crypto-fascist; everyone gangs up on Stalin; Hitler's overthrown by his own people; and even no atomic bombs. What could possibly be left? :Announcements for the summer offering usually come about November-December. We shall see. TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::So we shall. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) World War I AH? I'm wondering if we'll see more WWI material generally as a result of Centennial Fever. :HT has said on more than one occasion that WWI is the more important "choke point" of the 20th Century than WWII is (but that people want to read about II, not so much I). ::Reading about WWII feels good because, arguably, the good guys won, and in winning, accomplished something. (Exactly what is of course an extremely thorny question.) WWI, though, was abject suffering on a scale that's hard to imagine, and with the possible exception of independence for a few small countries like Ireland and Finland, not one damned thing came of it that you'd actually want. It makes for horribly depressing entertainment. ::However, its historical significance cannot be overstated. A week before the centennial of Franz Ferdinand's death, the Wall Street Journal published a special section on all the many historical events and trends which were carried forward by WWI's ripples. To make things even more depressing, the author suggested that even a lot of the most benighted corners of the pre-WWI world were making slow progress which the war disrupted. For instance, he cited some evidence that Russia was crawling down a path which could have led to limited government and a constitutional monarchy, then followed it up by asking "Would it actually have gotten there, or would reactionary forces have snapped it back before it did? There's no way to know. They got the Revolution and Stalin instead." Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) :I wouldn't object to a TWPE: WWI edition, with the war breaking out over First Moroccan Crisis or something. Or a return the Uncle Alf universe (since he's going back to Joe Steele, he might as well expand on a story that was actually open-ended.) TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) :::::A good one would be the Bosnian Annexation crisis. It would have caught the warring parties unawares, kinda like TWPE. Less prepared for war.JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) Actually I do have an AH of that which I suspect might be promising: More Republican primaries in 1912 and/or less influence for Taft in the RNC leads Theodore Roosevelt winning at the GOP nominating convention. I don't believe Taft had the charisma to lead a third party challenge of his own, and if the party's right wing bolts, they wouldn't draft him. Taft may not have been comfortable with presiding over a continued expansion of executive power, but all his policy preferences were solidly progressive. If conservative Republicans go off on their own, they'd get a right-wing standard bearer who could very well drain almost as much support from Wilson as he would from Roosevelt. If not, the right wing of the GOP could just stay home or cast protest votes or something, but I don't think that would seriously hurt Roosevelt. So you've got TR as President when the war breaks out, and you can bet that within a year's time he'd have found or manufactured an excuse to get involved. If all that American money and manpower comes pouring in on the Entente side while Russia's still in the fight and before the UK and France have been weakened through several years of attrition, the numerical inequality could possibly tell very quickly. So the war would still be nasty and brutish, but at least it would be short--maybe, just maybe, so short that the politicians who have to decide how it will end would not be so consumed with hatred that they'd impose an unjust peace which would just fuck things up all over again. ::: Con-roy has a Custer presidency overseeing the Spanish-American War novel coming out soon. Nauseating...JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) American Civil War AH? But I don't want that to be HT's next project. As I said, I want him to be done with mechanized warfare for a while. I'd like to see him go further back in time. Another Civil War story would be good. :: The last in Peter Tsouras' Civil War trilogy is coming out soon. I was a fan of those.JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) :::Is that the one called "The Union in Peril" or something? I read the first book when it came out, which if memory serves was almost a year later than it was supposed to. After a similarly open-ended wait that actually wound up being about a year and change I saw Book 2 on Amazon and added it to my wish list. It's been there ever since. I recall having a generally positive impression of Book 1 but no more than that (well I do have an oddly specific memory of reading it on a commuter train one day, but nothing about what I actually read). Whenever I consider springing for Book 2 I'm held back by the realization that I've forgotten everything that set it up. :::Of course, if Book 3 really is coming out in the near future, it really wouldn't matter if I were to read Book 2 now, in an odd way. I'd be going into one book ice-cold with a gap of years and years since its prequel, and then I'd go into the other book with a much more manageable pause in there. If I'd read Book 2 back when it came out, it would be the same situation in a different order. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:50, August 10, 2014 (UTC) Must and Shall Novel :Again, I'd be ok with a TWPE: ACW edition. Or a return to the Must and Shall universe (since he's going back to Joe Steele, he might as well expand on a story that was actually open-ended. Yes, I did deliberately repeat myself.) TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::You couldn't shift the ACW up by just one year, and probably not by four years either; it's easy to imagine the South seceding if Fremont had been elected, but it's very hard to imagine Fremont winning, and I don't see John McLean faring any better. Compromise of 1850 ::You could go back to the Compromise of 1850, maybe have Zachary Taylor survive his, umm, tragic cherry-eating binge and take a harder line than Fillmore did (a bit of irony there of course). You could go further back still, to the Nullification Crisis or even all the way to the Missouri Compromise. The farther back you go, the less the extent to which the free states economically outweigh the slave states, so these are fertile hunting grounds for AH concepts. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) :::The Compromise of 1850 failing because Taylor lives has always struck me as the POD with the most "commercial appeal"--you have a few of the key people from the real ACW available, plus the waning days of Clay and Webster (Calhoun's already gone) and others of their generation, the war with Mexico has ended only recently with all that entails, slavery is front and center. Overall it would still be "recognizable" to the casual Civil War buff, which would certainly help at the cash register. ::::If Taylor lives you'd have strong political leadership in the form of the last halfway decent Antebellum president. The Rebs might perceive they'd be better off with Fillmore in the White House; it's ironic that they'd prefer a New Yorker over a Louisianan, but I do believe that's how they'd see it. That, plus a smaller gap between the two sides in terms of resources (though the numbers would still favor the free states) could make for a conflict in which intrigue plays a greater role. That could save us from having HT drown us in front-line combat scenes as he did in this last series . . . or it could fall prey even more spectacularly to the bug's-eye-view formula that hamstrung TWTPE. ::::If nothing else, I think of the HW prologue where Ansaldo convinces Sanjurjo not to overpack the plane, or the MwIH prologue where Heydrich is not mortally wounded; and I think of how bizarre the circumstances of Taylor's death were; and I can't help smile to think of how amusing the same scene would be for this project. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:12, August 6, 2014 (UTC) :::::"Sorry I caused you to drop your cherries and milk, Mr. President. Please have my wine. I haven't touched it." TR (talk) 15:23, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::::::Something like that. He could have a mild stomach ache that would prevent the much greater one those cherries and milk caused. The day could be dreary and overcast. The flies could get into the cherries and lay a bunch of maggots, prompting Taylor to pass or the caterer or whatever he would have been called back then to throw them out. But jostling Taylor sounds like the most amusing way to do it without crossing into the absurd. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:53, August 7, 2014 (UTC) Nullification Crisis :::Nullification Crisis might also sell, given Jackson's presence, but then a "Civil War fought over tariffs" story doesn't sound quite so sexy and noble as "Civil War over slavery". The Missouri Compromise would have the problem of being set in an era that's not terribly familiar to most people, but would certainly have a great deal of AH potential given how early it is in the country's history. TR (talk) 16:40, August 5, 2014 (UTC) ::::I suspect that a war over nullification would have turned to slavery eventually, if the war dragged on and on; and the free and slave states were pretty close to each other resource-wise at that point, so it probably would. Drag on, that is. Free/slave would have been the divide, because that's the difference between an economic system that's helped or hurt by the tariffs in question. Northerners and Westerners would become aware of that distinction and would realize that encouraging slaves to liberate themselves disrupted the enemy's ability to wage war effectively. Jackson would see the merit in it, however reluctantly. There's also Clay to consider: He would support Jackson, as Douglas did Lincoln in the real war; and unlike Douglas, he wouldn't conveniently die immediately thereafter, so they'd have to come to some sort of accommodation despite their mutual contempt. Now Clay would probably grasp the necessity of giving up his own slave holdings, similar to Andrew Johnson and a handful of others in OTL, and the impoverishment of his own personal property just might give him moral standing to push others on the Union's side to do the same. If he truly has Jackson's ear, well . . . It couldn't be any harder to convince Jackson than it was to convince Jeremiah Stafford, could it? ::::I'm not seeing a resounding abolitionist victory coming of this, but I can conceive of disruption of the plantation economy reaching a point where slavery is a genie that can't be put back into its bottle--not without giving us our own Atlantean Servile Insurrection as a sequel series, which would be interesting indeed. I agree that 1850 is the most viable option, though, especially for a TWTPE-style "We're going with a variation on a theme" rather than a more radically different timeline. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:12, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::::As for 1820, that would put us at roughly the same point as Flint's project. It just occurred to me that I have no idea how commercially successful that was, but I'm sure you would know better than I would whether that's a role model of viability or not. Turtle Fan (talk) 04:12, August 6, 2014 (UTC) :::::I guess it did just fine. DelRey was expecting the monster hit that 1632 wound up being for Baen, and instead it was just a very big hit, or so Flint says, anyway. TR (talk) 15:23, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::::::I bought the first book as a hardcover but never got around to reading it, and now that I think of it I haven't seen it on the shelf in quite some time, so I'd imagine it's no longer in my possession. Flint got my money either way, though. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:54, August 7, 2014 (UTC) ::::::::I would like to see something along the lines of the War of Austrian Succession or the Byzantines surviving the Ottoman onslaught. The break up of Yugoslavia in the 1970s would also be interesting. JudgeFisher (talk) 20:26, August 9, 2014 (UTC) The Daimon Novel Something pre-industrial would be better. :A return to The Daimon could be nice, something something Joe Steele open-ended something. TR (talk) 18:36, August 4, 2014 (UTC) ::It's a good formula. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:06, August 5, 2014 (UTC) :::Maybe a different WWII AH would be for Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili's parents to emigrate to the U.S. in the 1870s and Joe becomes President and ... oh, wait. ML4E (talk) 19:09, August 6, 2014 (UTC) ::::Maybe that will be the first in a six-book series? Turtle Fan (talk) 03:55, August 7, 2014 (UTC) Category:Forum